Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Essential blanket-making material: scrap paper

My ripple blanket is coming along nicely, currently looking like this:There's been some behind-the-scenes organizational work on its behalf too, though. Last weekend, in a fit of I-don't-even-know-what, I did this:In case you can't tell just by looking at it, it's the color progression plan for the entire blanket. Since I'm making it at least partly to use up yarn that isn't allotted for other projects, I don't want to have to buy anything for it, and I was a little worried about using up all of the pretty colors early on and having two thirds of the blanket just be beige and light grey, which are the two I have the most of.

I had already figured out that one two-row stripe of Cascade 220 takes just a smidge under one ounce of yarn. Each stripe is about an inch in height and I'd like the blanket to be 72" long. So I cut out 72 small pieces of scrap paper, weighed each of the yarns I had set aside for the project and assigned that yarn a number of paper pieces up to but not more than its weight in ounces. So, if I had 2 5/8 oz. of aqua, it got two pieces.

Then I took two little snips of the yarn, taped them to those pieces and set them aside, numbering them to correspond to a key I made to indicate which yarns are which. I have three different dark purples in the mix, for instance, and it's not always easy to tell what's what from a 1" snip. When I had weighed and snipped all of the yarn, I arranged the paper pieces so that colors and neutrals and lights and darks were all distributed in a balanced way and then taped them to other pieces of scrap paper that I had numbered to correspond to the rows.

I'm sure it's not going to be perfect — I might find that non-Cascade yarns take more than an ounce to complete a stripe, leaving me with not enough yarn to meet the demands of the little paper pieces assigned to it, or the opposite, that I have extra of some colors to use up or, quite likely, both — but having this framework to check myself against will be very helpful. And with the brain work done, I can just sit back and crochet now.